WASHINGTON (Associated Press) -- Top researchers now agree that the world is likely to get stronger but fewer hurricanes in the future because of global warming, seeming to settle a scientific debate on the subject. But they say there's not enough evidence yet to tell whether that effect has already begun.

Since just before Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana and Mississippi in 2005, dueling scientific papers have clashed about whether global warming is worsening hurricanes and will do so in the future. The new study seems to split the difference. A special World Meteorological Organization panel of 10 experts in both hurricanes and climate change _ including leading scientists from both sides _ came up with a consensus, which is published online Sunday in the journal Nature Geoscience.

The earth will take care of itself because it's alive. Too hot?, bring on more water vapor and clouds (kicking radiation back into space). When people get hot they sweat- heat is removed as water turns to vapor (gas).

Earth, like humans, can deal with either extreme (hot or cold) by changing it's reflectivity which happens to coincide with air's ability to hold moisture (more when hot, less when cold).

IF it's getting warmer (which is doubtful) and IF CO2 is the culprit, expect more clouds to correct the situation. Bigger storms with greater intensity? Not if it's a gradual warming. To whip-up the atmosphere like that, you'd need pulses of energy from the sun where earth makes rapid corrections to spikes in radiation.

My concern would be whether carbon dioxide can impede the earth's ability to 'sweat' as that would be serious- like someone in the desert without sweat glands. Since I'm not a chemist, I don't know if CO2 could displace water vapor and earth's ability to 'cool' itself from whatever 'warming' might take place.

My guess is that it wouldn't, but by adding CO2 to H2O you might get something a little more acidic so I'll pick-up some azaleas and other acid-loving plants to 'correct' this aberration.

You know that they are reaching when they bring up Katrina....This particular hurricane will of course be long remembered because of the damage it did but in the grand scheme of things, there have been worse ones that have made landfall. Katrina did a lot of damage in Mississippi but it was the flooding of NOLA that it will forever be associated with... and that event had far less to do with the ferocity of the storm than it had to do with levies that that were totally inadequate.

19
posted on 02/21/2010 1:13:26 PM PST
by Asfarastheeastisfromthewest...
(The urge to save humanity is almost always a false-face for the urge to rule it.....Mencken)

The funny thing is that, while big and powerful and self-important mankind can’t push around the weather, except according to Al “Nimrod” Gore, an ordinary plankton bloom might be able to.

That is, a plankton bloom at sea, can warm the surface temperature of the water over a large area by a degree or two, which could raise the strength of a hurricane by one force level.

Well, if plankton can do that, can we do something like that, but in the opposite direction? That is, cooling water surface temperature over a large area?

Possibly. Some years ago, a brilliant and inventive scientist had an unusual idea. He noted that warm sea water has a very thin layer on its surface that is much warmer, but acts to limit evaporation of the cooler water just a few millimeters beneath it. You can even notice this effect in a still swimming pool on a very hot day.

So, he figured, if that thin layer of warm water could be busted up, evaporation would increase over many square miles of water, and if done at a large scale out at sea, it might be enough to cause rain inland.

His idea was to create enormous vertical wind turbines, that would pump out a mist of cold sea water into the air. And this mist would itself cool because of evaporation, and break up the thin, warm layer below it.

Well, using wind turbines for this would be the big engineering problem, by why use them at all? Just a few fire fighting ships well ahead of the path of a hurricane could in concert spray a great quantity of water into the air, that the still gentle incoming winds from the hurricane, then continue to spray as they advance along the projected route.

All they have to do is just cool down a few millimeters of water over a large area, then let evaporation continue the cooling process. By the time the hurricane arrives, hopefully it would be enough to lower its force by one level.

Here is the funny thing. Big storms are driven by temperature differentials between the poles and the equator. So if global warming is true, we should see greater warming at the poles, which drops the differntial between the poles and equator which should mean less storms and of less intensity. Ironically, that is what we have seen since Katrina, but the global warming people are so wedded to scare stories, that they can’t even latch onto the one thing that can possibly corroborate their predictions, because it doesn’t sound scary enough. (Note: yes I understand the weather is much more complicated than that)

21
posted on 02/21/2010 3:04:36 PM PST
by dsrtsage
(One half of all people have below average IQ...In the US the number is 54%)

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